Carlisle Contract

The contract day was finally upon us. This would mean our 100% commitment to the project, our first installment payment and hundreds of initials/signatures! We were lucky as we received the contracts two days before the contract meeting, normally it comes the day before.

The appointment begin with a briefing on the HIA contract (Basically terms & conditions, as well as your obligations, with the stage payments all listed) & the house contract itself (couple of centimeters thick!)

The house contract contained the color selection document that we had seen at tender, revision 2 with the updates made, soil tests, permits & Carlisle insurance documents. It also contained the much sought after working drawings (needed for bank valuation and our own personal perusal!) 

We still had some items to follow up from tender, of which the Carlisle person handling the Contract was happy to go upstairs and have them costed - while allowing us time to read the contract in detail and review the selection to ensure they were correct.

At contract, as I had confirmed with Carlisle, we were allowed to make small changes - such as those to the electrical (position, additional power points, lights, etc). After some deep pondering, we had decided to add a fair amount of extra power points - as I had deemed we had not spent enough on extra power points! We aimed to cover areas for vacuuming / lighting (mostly hallways) and to ensure there were not gaps large areas without power coverage. We also added one on the pillar near the alfresco doors - to allow it to run a cable outside (should it be needed on a temporary basis), without the expensive cost of another outdoor power point / lack of walls space out there for one.

While these issues were looked into/costed, we signed all the paperwork - about a hundred pages for each copy of the contract - so the meeting was efficient, that once we were happy and briefed on the contract, we were left to sign at our own pace while costing and further alterations were done.

We also raised an ongoing issue (battle) over the setback of the house. This had been going on for months now - as the developer had given the OK many times about the house being able to be brought forward (porch is excluded from the minimum frontal distance), however Carlisle had been resistive on the majority of occasions.

We raised it at Contract, with emails to back us - which the Contract person was happy to pass on and have approved. We will probably hear back in a couple of weeks when we have the building drawings.

At the conclusion of the meeting, we paid our 5% first installment payment (Clearly stated in HIA Contract). For first time people, be aware that this cost is normally paid by yourself, not the bank - which we had to inquire about prior to the contract day (and lucky we did!). The first of several cheque's to be paid to Carlisle homes.

How our loan for the house is working is, we pay the installment payments until we use up our deposit / available funds and then the bank takes over from there - counting our installment payments as our 'deposit' towards the house (not like the land loan - were it is the conventional pay them the deposit and they pay all the money to the vendor).

Site start was still estimated at about a months time, to be finalized in the coming weeks.

We also have a few things to follow up ourselves, with the local council - such as asset protection & infrastructure levy - costing around $2k in the area we are in.